


O, Bird!

by cathedraltunes



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Fix-It, Gen, Grief, Hopeful Ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-20
Updated: 2020-11-20
Packaged: 2021-03-10 05:28:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,966
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27638216
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cathedraltunes/pseuds/cathedraltunes
Summary: Dean looks for Castiel in the thin spaces. (Post-15x19. Speculative.)
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester, Dean Winchester & Sam Winchester, Eileen Leahy/Sam Winchester
Comments: 29
Kudos: 240





	O, Bird!

The sparrows hidden in the dark and wooded spaces of a single bush made conversation. Their wings rustled as they moved unseen. If a man were to brush a hand against the bush, these small birds might still. 

Might take flight: small wings, plain-feathered, a flutter of thin bodies in sudden violent motion some to dart here and some to dart there and others to gather together, a flock low to the ground, pale trembling breasts bound in species kinship. To each beast the sphere of its bone. 

  
  
  
  


AM bands sputter across the seeded expanse of the Great Plains. Rough static, the whispering voices of cities reaching out for each other. 

_Do you think yourself a praying man?_ asks a preacher man about fifty miles out of Spearfish, North Dakota. _You a man knows to bend the knee? And when the Lord waits for your word do you speak it so that He may hear, or you just putting your two hands together and moving your lips thinking about that beer you got waiting for you back home?_

He flicks through the glove box for a cassette, slams it in without a look. Mid-song the speakers blare drums, a snarl:

_As long as the planets are turning-_

_As long as the stars are burning-_

Meatloaf, Bat Out Of Hell 2: Back Into Hell. 1993. Dean drums his fingers against the wheel. His elbow hangs out the window. He glances sidelong, passenger seat. Thinking he’s gonna say--

Don’t matter.

  
  
  


Sam and Eileen got a little house in Oregon. Two stories, no cellar to speak of. All this for their troubles. 

He leaves a duffle in the Impala with the gear but brings another in with him. Clothes, a bottle of bootleg shit wrapped snug in a jacket, gifts for the kids. 

Sam always comes out first to welcome Dean home. A week this time. A month this other time. Big galoof of a baby brother smiling with lines at his eyes now.

They embrace like this: hard, savage, Dean trying to pull Sam down into his ribs. Two kids with a dead mom and a drunk father living out of a car this week, a $50 a night motel room the next week. All their clothes stinking like mildew.

“Hey, dickhead,” Sam says to the crown of Dean’s head.

“Hey, bitch,” Dean says to Sam’s fucking collarbone. “You ever gonna stop standing on that porch when you hug me?”

“Hell, no,” says Sam. “I’m lording it over you.”

Time was Dean would’ve shoved a wet knuckle in Sam’s ear for that. But now Sam’s got the squirts and Uncle Dean can’t be a bad influence unless he wants wet knuckles in both his ears, Sam on the right and Eileen coming from the left.

Bridget’s eldest at five and Sean a year younger. Aaron ain’t more than a year, or at any rate Dean figures he’s not much past one, stuck in that weird nebulous space where a kid could be anywhere from ten months to two years. They’re easy to shop for, kids that young. You just pick up whatever makes the most noise or has the brightest collection of flashing lights and throw it at them like meat to lions. Eileen doesn’t give a shit about the noise but the looks Sam gives him when Uncle Dean plays at Santa, they’re the kind of looks that light Dean up.

“You realize all of this is going into the trash in a week,” Sam says through his teeth to Dean. He’s smiling benevolently at his rioting young. Dean might as well have turned them into tiny cultists. 

Eileen signs rapidly at Sam and Dean. Dean’s learned enough to get the gist of it. “Your ears, your problem.” Dean laughs. 

Sam glowers at him and signs to Eileen, “Our children, our problem.”

With a wicked little smile that wrinkles her nose, Eileen signs and says, “Did everyone say thank you to Uncle Dean? For your new, best, favorite toys?”

“Thank you!” “Thank ya!” “Thank you, thank you, thank you!” Bridget sings while signing flashfire-like at her chest.

Sam wedged his elbow in Dean's side.

The house is full of the act of living. Sam’s a teacher now at the rural elementary school and Eileen writes paranormal romance stories, go figure. Self-published mainly but she does all right by it and Sam says Harlequin’s contracted a couple. Dean made a few jokes but he’s read ‘em and they’re decent even if the sex scenes, and boy are there sex scenes, make him widgy thinking Eileen might write them thinking about her own romance.

He’s proud of them. Of course he’s proud of them. Lookit his little bug of a brother, all grown up, making sprogs, living off his wife’s Harlequin royalties.

“‘Sprogs?’” says Eileen. 

They’re sitting on the screened-in porch out back with the mosquito lights on and beers in hand or near enough to hand. The humidity makes Eileen’s dark hair curl at her ears. Sam keeps brushing at it. Their beer bottles sweat. 

“Thanks, your compliments still suck,” says Sam. “You remember I’m forty-three, right?”

“That can’t be right,” says Dean. He slings his legs out in front of him and crosses ‘em at the ankles. “I’m only thirty-six.”

Sam snorts. Eileen leans forward in her woven chair, bottle clasped between her knees, and she looks between the two of them. In the dim light of evening, the mosquito lights a weird flavor of orange, she looks like a city ghost in stark chiaroscuro. The easy curl of Sam’s body, turned to her, pulls some low, sad strings in Dean. 

“Are you accusing me of cradle-robbing?” she says. 

Sam, about nine feet tall, forty-three, he breaks up into a seizing comma. Dean pounds his back and gives Eileen a look that says, yeah, okay, nice shot. She settles in her chair, taking a long pull on her beer. 

The last few echoes of sunlight disappear behind the trees. Crickets tune their instruments for the late orchestra. The hour slinks on into the night.

“Gotta check on Aaron,” Sam says. Eileen’s already gone in. Dean waves him off, promises he’ll be in in a couple minutes.

He sits low-slung in the chair with the small of his back pinched and aching. Birds holler through the darkness at each other. The gravel path leading from the porch into the woods, that terminates at a little lake. If Dean closes his eyes and concentrates, he can hear the water slicking. How it eats at the shore then falls back into its basin only to come up hungry again.

“Hey,” he murmurs. “You out there?”

He listens. The lake murmurs, or he imagines it does. Somewhere among the trees, a deer starts and her fawn follows. Their bodies hulk through the undergrowth. 

After a while, Dean finishes the rest of the bottle. He finishes Sam’s, too, left on the little square glass table between their chairs. He takes the glasses inside with him and dumps them into the bin marked for recycling. 

“Gotta save the earth,” he says to the ceiling. “Working on that. One bottle at a time.” He laughs. It’s not the right kind of laugh. He can’t get it to sound right, not alone. 

“Jesus,” he says. “God damn it.” He knuckles his eyes.

  
  
  


He tracks the witch across Louisiana. Not many survivors and he might not have even caught the pattern if it weren’t for the forums where the would-be GhostFacers and paranormal investigators liked to hang out. 

_Real World Mirror of Erised???_

_posted by BergaraBabygirl_

_10 posts_

He’d found a survivor in an outpatient ward, a skinny, sloe-eyed black woman who sat in front of a window. She twisted regularly in her chair. Trying to find the right angle for a reflection then jerking away when she found it. Her name was Patricia. She was twenty-six. She wore a cheap necklace chain with a good silver pendant, an angel with hands clasped in prayer.

“He was a tall white man,” she told Dean in a sigh. Her eyes rolled to the window then to him with effort. “And I mean, he was tall. Lot taller than you, or might be it was the suit he wore. One of those black suits like he worked out of a funeral home. But he had on this hat… I couldn’t figure out what color it was, it seemed like it was always changing but I didn’t notice, I don’t know how but when he talked I didn’t notice anything. That’s how I got into the back of that shop.”

He asked her to describe the shop. A cramped one room store, she described, not much different from any of a number of goth shops all around the south and the seaboard. But the real treasure was in the back room. That’s where he kept the mirror.

Her cheeks stood out like knives. Her eyes dropped. She’d picked the skin at the tips of her fingers. 

“He said, he could show me anything I wanted,” Patricia whispered.

Dean waited. He knew how to do that now, sitting quiet with his hands hanging from his knees. Head tipped just so to one side, like a bird or maybe more like a dog hearing a name it never heard before.

Patricia worked her fingers. She looked at the mirror, at her own face. Her eyes were damp, her eyelashes wet. She dropped her eyes again.

“I wanted to see my mama,” she said. “That’s all. I thought he was just messing around. My mama died when I was five is why. So I said I wanted to see my mama.” She swallowed. Fiercely she looked at Dean. She needed belief. She wanted faith. “And you know what I say in that mirror? Mr I’m from Buzzfeed? I saw my mama. I saw my mama and she smiled and I knew she saw me too. So when he asked me for my money I gave him my whole god damn purse because my mama had her hand up on the glass and I had mine up on the other side, on this side, and I could feel her. I could feel how warm she was through the glass.”

She fell back in her chair. Her eyes dulled.

“And then I was in the hospital,” she said. “I’d been missing two weeks. They told me it was lucky I hadn’t died. And I thought maybe I dreamed the whole thing until the nurse helped me walk to the bathroom and I looked in that piddly mirror and I saw my mama all over again.”

Patricia turned her face from him entirely. Her hair was cut short, ragged-like. As if she’d cut it herself without a mirror.

“Can I ask you something?” 

She exhaled. “Sure you can,” said Patricia. “Can’t stop you.”

Dean concentrated on his notebook, on the Bic pen he’d chewed the cap off. “Why’d you sign yourself in here? If you could see her.”

“‘Cause it’s a reflection,” said Patricia. She looked at Dean and she had on her that weight, that awful weight, that blanket of knowing the truth and living with it. “That’s all it is. Maybe it’s magic. Maybe it really is my mama looking at me. But she’s not here. And I think like, maybe she’s only in there if I look at her. So where is she the rest of the time? Maybe she’s somewhere good. Maybe she’s sleeping somewhere and I just keep waking her up and pulling her over so she can see what she missed out on. 

“I don’t think that’s fair, do you?” she asked Dean quietly.

He supposes he doesn’t think that’s fair at all.

  
  
  


“Kids wanna know if you’ll be staying,” Sam says. Zero pressure, way he puts it out there.

They’ve got a dog now at their two story house in Oregon and Dean’s nose won’t stop leaking. Everybody’s outside throwing frisbees for the dog, some six month old retriever living in pig heaven right now with kids shouting and running all over the place, tripping in the leaves and screaming when the dog licks their faces. Aaron, unimpressed, lingers by his mother’s legs.

“Yeah,” says Dean. “Couple of weeks. If it’s not too much trouble.”

“Could stay longer,” says Sam.

“And put you lovebirds out? I know how it goes. I’ve seen John Candy’s work.”

“Eileen’s fine with it.” 

The woman in question picks up one of the abandoned frisbees and calls out to the puppy. Sean makes bereaved noise, to lose the dog like this. Bridget calls him a weiner and shoves fall leaves down the back of his sweater while he howls.

“I love your family,” says Dean. “You’ve got really good kids, Sammy. They’re horrible little goblins, just like you.”

Sam shoves him over. Dean, yelling, goes. He gets a hand on Sam’s sleeve though and Sam comes down just as hard. Then they’re wrestling, getting elbows in places that didn’t used to be this soft, and Sam’s got a palmful of leaves and dirt that he’s just grinding into Dean’s face like the piece of shit Sam is, like he’s not an adult with a mortgage and an eco-friendly car and a job teaching six year olds not to shit their pants in the classroom.

He tells Sam this. Sam says with disgust, “Six year olds are potty-trained.”

“Not you,” says Dean.

Sam piledrives another fistful of leaves halfway down Dean’s throat. There’s a clicking sound. They look up. Eileen waves merrily at them with her iPhone in the other hand, its three lenses gleaming ominously. The kids swarm them. Then comes the puppy, to really destroy Dean’s sinuses.

Later, as Sam corrals the kids for their bath, Eileen catches Dean in the kitchen scrubbing down his arms. He’s thinking of a teriyaki spin on a cheesy chicken casserole and how he might get away with it, probably less cheese and using more rice as the base. 

Eileen says, “Hey, Dean,” and he looks up from the work of soaping dirt out from under his nails.

She sign-says, “Please stay. If you want the guest room…” and she tips her head meaningfully in the direction of the room where he’s been crashing.

He turns the water on to rinse away the soap. He clears his throat.

“Yeah,” he says and then remembers to turn to her, to make his lips visible. “Yeah. Um. Thanks. I’ll think about it.”

“You know that you’re family,” she says. “You are always welcome here. Please. We love you.”

He’s gruff, he knows. He tries not to be. Clumsily he signs, “I love you. All. Much.”

Eileen signs, “We know,” and smiles that nose-winkling smile of hers, the smile that Sam must have fallen in love with the way that everyone falls in love with a smile. Dean thinks of a slighter smile, a puzzled one. He’ll probably head out on Saturday. In the dark of the morning, before the kids are up.

“I’ll think about it,” he tells Eileen. 

She nods. Her smile is leaner. She sees better than a lot of people do. 

  
  
  


Baton Rouge, not New Orleans: he gives the witch that much. He gets help from another hunter already hanging around the parish next door, a black woman a little older and much fitter than Patricia. Her name is Graciela but her driver’s license says Gracie Lee. She’s more a librarian than an in the field researcher but she’s a hell of a shot with a crossbow and she knows a lot of archaic sigils and wards that would make Sam drool. 

On the drive over to the witch’s shop, the real shop, the one he teleports his victims to in order to entrance them then rob them, Dean talks their own kind of shop.

“Can’t say I ever heard of a summoning like that.” She says it with a slightly unfocused gaze, though, the kind of nerd look that means she’s looking inward through the Dewey decimal system of her brain. “Now a plain angel summons, that I know. How to pull someone out of chains or a ward…”

“Just wondering,” Dean says. He’s drumming his thumbs on the steering wheel. The Impala purrs darkly down narrow streets.

“It’s never just wondering,” says Graciela with some kind distance. “Not with hunters. Maybe if I could get some cross-referencing down on some of the older texts I got. Katrina really wrecked a lot of what we had here in Louisiana and you know how stingy other hunters get about their libraries.”

“Not really,” Dean admits. “That was more my brother’s thing.”

“Of course!” She lights up. It’s in her smile, the bounce of her shoulders. “Sam Winchester, obviously, ‘course that’s your brother. You don’t know if he’s still into the paper mill?”

“He might be,” Dean says, “but he’s mostly retired now. I could give him your number.”

“That would be quite nice of you. He wrote up some really interesting papers consolidating older texts, making them workable for modern magic.” Graciela hums with pleasure. 

There isn’t much pleasure in the rest of the day. As witch hunts go it isn’t too tricky at the end of it. Graciela happens to know some involved spellwork that turns magic off like a light switch. 

But there’s a moment, in the back of the store, near the velvet curtain that separates all the hodge podge tourist shit from the real deal. The witch says, “I know what you want, Dean Winchester,” as Dean with heavy leather gloves, emblazoned with all the usual metals and symbols, pins him to the wall. “I can show you what you want.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Dean snarls. “You don’t know shit, you jumped up back alley gangster.” It’s not his best insult. 

“I can give it to you,” the witch says, begging. “What you want to see, who you want to touch, it’s all right there waiting for you. And it’s easy, Dean. Oh, Dean, it’s so easy.”

“This is the wheedling you’ve been doing?” He puts on a big show of disbelief. “Buddy, you must be something else when I don’t have you pinned up to the wall with a hand on your throat.” He demonstrates.

Then Graciela comes through glowing up like some sort of dewy sunshine with a smell of roses and violets haloed about her and she says three words and just like that, the white man’s Dr Facilier is out cold.

They call in a collector, some guy who knows how to handle old, enchanted artifacts. Waiting, Dean touches the velvet: the fabric an itch on his fingers. He thinks of that mirror and thinking of it, feels it like a thing with heavy hands gripping on to his arms. Oh, Dean. It'd be so easy. He twitches the curtain back in place and turns, pacing the shop, touching little silver knives, tea infusers, journals clay-fronted with glass eyes that watch.

  
  
  


It snows in Oregon for Christmas. Dean makes it that year and for his work, when he pulls up on Christmas Eve, he’s put in a red suit and a white beard and the fake pregnancy belly that Sam and Eileen just happen to have for no reason at all, Dean. So it’s Santa who comes in to the house and not Uncle Dean.

Bridget and Aaron and even the damn dog eat it up, but Sean gets struck with shyness so severe he has to back up the stairs and sit crying tiny little sobs on the landing because he’s afraid Santa will know he broke a plate four days ago. 

But Sam’s good. Sam’s so good, Jesus, Dean’s baby brother might have swallowed Satan and lost his soul and got it back, all after growing up with the same dad Dean grew up with, but he’s good. He goes up those stairs too and he sits by Sean and he puts a big hand around his little guy’s shoulders and he lets Sean cry. 

And when Sean’s calm again, that’s when Santa comes up to look through the railing at Sean on the landing and says, “Now, for a boy who made a little trouble, I have just the thing. Would you like a present that’s a little trouble?” He winks at Sam. 

Sean nods, red-splotched from tears. 

“How about your Uncle Dean come stay with you?”

He blows the roof off that joint. 

And it’s all good, not just the man his brother’s grown up to be and not just the good kids he’s got or the first copy of Eileen’s latest porn-o-rama that she pressed solemnly into Dean’s hand. It’s all so good. It’s like home again, like how it used to be in the bunker, when Jack was more a kid than a god, when Sam read books in esoteric dead languages and Dean made dinner more nights than others, and Castiel slept in a room just down from Dean’s and he’d come into the kitchen when Dean cooked and sit there smiling, eyes sleepy, his hair a goddam disaster, lines creasing all the strange broad angles of his face into other, sweeter shapes. 

Dean would tune the radio into the oldies channel and he’d sing the words to some song he faintly remembered his mom used to sing with his dad. Maybe he’d dance a little in the kitchen. Castiel would grin and provide sports commentary. Dean’d turn on his heel with pizazz and Castiel would say, “That’s very nice, Dean. Carbon is a carcinogen,” with humor lurking in his dark blue eyes, and then the overhead sprinklers would go off and Jack would laugh delightedly and Sam would start swearing about the books and then they’d all give him shit. 

But Christ, weren’t they happy? Weren’t they happy then, like this? 

New Year’s Eve and the kids are in bed and Sam and Eileen are yawning. Dean is too. Nobody’s making it to midnight. Maybe he’s had too much champagne. Maybe he drank a whole bottle all on his own. Every year he sees a little more of John Winchester in him. He looks in the mirror and some sad man with furrowed brow looks back out at him. His face is thicker. He doesn’t shave like he used to. 

He comes out of the bathroom, his head a little dizzy. He goes in the kitchen for the second bottle. In the living room he can hear Sam murmuring to Eileen. Dean’s stomach clenches. He gulps down crushing swigs of champagne. The bubbles burn in his throat, compacted as he swallows more. When he’s done he drops the bottle in the sink and hangs there, hands gripping the sink’s lip and his eyes burning, burning white hot, burning straight out of his dumb ape skull.

Alerted, perhaps, by the clumsy drop of the bottle, Sam comes into the kitchen. He turns on the light. Dean bows his back against it. Sam says, “Dean.”

Dean says, “It’s not fucking fair.”

Sam says, “It isn’t,” without even knowing what Dean is talking about, and there’s too much of John in Dean, there was always too much of John in Dean, he’s their fucking father’s son ‘cause he reels around and jabs two fingers at Sam and says,

“You don’t know what the fuck you’re agreeing to, Sammy, better read the fine print before you sign away,” in a mean voice, in a mean drunk voice.

“So why don’t you stop being a shithead and tell me,” says Sam. So calm. So fucking good. For a minute there Dean could almost hate him.

“It isn’t fucking fair,” Dean snaps, “because it’s not, it fucking isn’t. The, the happy little house, happy fucking family, making, cooking dinner every night, and fuck, it’s--” He turns his face up. He swallows. He swallows. His eyes burn like they’re going to blaze blue-white through his eyelids. 

“This is my life, Dean.” Sam approaches him steadily with hands low.

“I know,” Dean snarls. “I know. I know it’s yours. And I’m so proud of you, Sammy, you got such great kids, man, and Eileen is, but uh, you know.” Fuck him. Fuck him. He feels the tears pushed out by the pressure, hot things like a trail of sap rather than beads. “I wanted this shit too. I wanted the, uh, the whole… domestic bullshit American happy ending, I wanted. All of that.”

Sam holds him. He says, “You have it. You can have it with us.”

Dean shakes his head. God help him, he loves his brother, he loves Bridget with her freckles and loud mouth, he loves shy little Sean, he loves serious baby Aaron, he loves Eileen, brilliant clever diamond-edged Eileen. Fuck, he loves the dumbshit dog. 

He thinks of wings, the ways that sparrows take flight in a rush, the rustling of feathers in his ear.

He says, “I wanted it,” and then he bites down on everything inside of him, every shit thing, every beautiful thing, every thing he brought from hell and every thing he stole from heaven.

Sam says, “Yeah. I know you did,” and Dean turns his face into his brother’s shoulder and he doesn’t cry. He doesn’t cry. He puts it away somewhere deep. He puts it away. Dad couldn’t get it put away and look how that ended up. Drove himself bitter-sick and full of hate until he died.

“I’m not gonna be like Dad,” Dean tells Sam.

“You’ll never have his beard,” says Sam, but he turns it into something gentle by leaning away and pressing a kiss to Dean’s brow. A benediction. A baton passing. 

  
  
  


He drinks more than he used to but he doesn’t drink as consistently. Castiel went on benders, once every blue moon, and Dean figures that’s the way to do it. So he burns a hole in his liver and he spends the next two months drinking sober most of the time before the clock’s hands shift and he holes up with a couple bottles of cheap vodka and a bottle of halfway to decent wine, for class. 

He fell asleep once in a park. He made the choice to do it well before he was truly drunk. The night sky had cleared of the morning’s clouds. There were stars out, not many, but enough. Light pollution made the ring of trees glow golden-sour. But the stars, the stars. The moon showed crisp and white, pregnant on the one side. 

In the morning he woke up with his head halfway under a bush. His eyelashes brushed tiny pale yellow leaves, leaves that hadn’t got enough water or enough sunlight to green like the rest of the bush. He heard feathers brushing against feathers. Sparrows, as they moved about in their own little natural city. His heart yawned. 

He heard Castiel in his ear, quoting as he had liked to quote from Matthew as he stood out in the little garden behind the bunker, speaking not to Dean, watching from the door, but to the birds that liked to pick at the dirt and chirp at one another.

“Do you not spend two pennies for a sparrow?” he asked the sparrows seriously. “If even one should fall, it shall not fall outside our Father’s care. And even the number of the hairs on your head are so counted.” He’d looked at Dean then. “Do not be afraid,” Castiel had said gently to him. “You are worth more than many sparrows.”

Then he’d sprayed Dean with the hose. 

Dean rolled from under the brush. Ants moved across the dirt, into the grass he’d crushed as he slept. 

  
  
  


All these things without you. All these things, still I bear witness, and what I witness I witness alone. So I am carrying them within me, and I am waiting to share them with you.

  
  
  


Sam calls him. He’s pulling an all-nighter across the plateaus of New Mexico chasing after word of a breeding rawhead nest. 

“Jesus, Sammy, it’s three in the morning. What the hell are you doing up?”

“Do you know Graciela?” Sam asks, urgent-like.

“Gracie, yeah, how do you know her? You getting back in the game?”

“We’ve been e-mailing.” Sam skirts the second question, a joke rather than a jab, by simply ignoring it. “She sent me a couple photos of a book she picked up, she says from that witch you guys knocked over last year?”

“Yeah, that Slenderman drip.” Dean snorts and holding phone between shoulder and ear, he grabs for his gas station coffee to take a drag. “What’s she got?”

“Well, the photos are shit--”

“Very ladylike, Samantha.”

Sam persists: “But I think that … she maybe … and I mean maybe, Dean. But I think she may have found something.”

He alerts. “Something bad?” He’s trying to figure out how fast he can get rid a couple horny rawheads to deal with some, what, cursed book, summoning book, witch coven that cursed a summoning book.

“Dean,” Sam says, “I think it can find Cas.”

  
  
  


Graciela waits for him. She’d bundled up, even in Georgia, and her lips are chapped. She says, “I hate dry winters. This shit is hell on my hair,” and while Dean’s trying to think of something to say, something civil and sociable, she shoves a briefcase at him.

“This book is old,” she warns him, “I mean it is old as hell. It is old as _balls_ , Dean, you touch this thing with your bare hands and it’s ‘bout to turn to dust. I been trying to snoop around and see if maybe those Men of Letters got anything on it, maybe a digitized copy or something, but I don’t got the access your brother’s got.”

“Right. Gloves, special lights, no sneezing, no coughing.”

“No liquids,” Graciela insists.

“I won’t jack off to it,” Dean says with maybe a touch too much sarcasm.

Under her knitted hat, Graciela’s eyebrows arch. She says, “Not if you want to get your boyfriend back.”

“That,” says Dean. He stops and looks at her.

She says, “Hunters gossip, ding-dong,” sounding so young in her thirty years that Dean immediately wants to curl on the ground and die. 

Only he can’t do that right now, because he’s holding in his hands a briefcase, a pretty thick metal briefcase and that means atmosphere control, and he’s about to take it to a shitty motel room and hopefully not fuck the whole thing up.

Graciela softens. She says, “Everybody likes a love story.”

  
  


He hears it sometimes when he dreams. That cold rushing sound, as it ripped out of the air. Castiel smiles. He says, “I love you,” and Dean says-- 

He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t get the chance. He didn’t know he could have one.

  
  
  


Dean buys weird UV lights and a box of gloves and a pair of tweezers and black-out curtains and duct tape and because he’s in Georgia, a bottle of Chattanooga whiskey that he takes one pull from before he gets to work fixing up the hotel room. Just for the book’s fragility he goes all out and gets a room at the Holiday Inn. He pulls the curtains shut then tapes the black-out curtains over them. He gets the lights up, turns the room’s air conditioning on to max, spreads a towel over the meager table, and snaps on his gloves before he dares touch the briefcase’s locks.

Such books, if such books exist, old as they must be, how tender the gloved hands that turn each onion thin page. Ink worn so pale that each word, to read it you must sit still with all of you given over to the work. You must not tear the paper. You must not run your finger across the page, smudging what some poor god-gripped puppet put down in a smoke-lit dingy room.

His hand doesn’t tremble. He reads. Every now and then he writes something on the pad of note paper he swiped from a bar in Alabama. Gunpowder, that makes a careful man out of you. Silver, salt. The pen digs in. The sheet beneath has pale crevices worn into it. He writes over those too.

The sun comes up. He knows it by the hour. Sweat sticks his shirt to him. He closes the book. Puts it back in the briefcase then locks it away. Checks the atmo shit. Strips away the gloves. 

On the table he left the bottle of Chattanooga whiskey. _This shit, Cas, eyes up, this shit you sip_ , snatching it out of his hand. He shoulders out the door. Georgia cold hits him. He forgot to put on something with sleeves.

Sleeveless, Dean stands in front of the motel windows, drinking whiskey out the neck, the rising sun spilling his leaning shadow behind him across the glass. Now, righteous man, what the hell you gonna do? Forty-seven pushing on fifty. In a handful of years, he’ll have outlived his own daddy. John sits heavy in his bones. Weight on his back. 

He lowers the bottle. He screws the cap back on. Very gently, he puts it on the black-painted iron railing. The dawn light makes something out of that burnt amber drink. He watches how it shines. How it makes another gleaming sun.

Then he goes back in the room and shuts the door.

Dean grips the bed and lowers to his knees. His back aches. The right knee twinges and the left snap crackle pops. He rests his forehead against the edge of the bed, where the sheets pulled free of the mattress when he tried a few minutes to sleep. 

“Hey, Cas,” he says. He licks his lips. His palms are tacky, dry powder from the gloves clumped from sweat. 

He never figured out how to pray. Never had room for it in the thin and tender spaces between his bones. Not real prayer. Not like how they do it in the clapboard churches and under the big revival tents, the places where prayer comes out like effluence, fetid and fecund all at once.

He closes his eyes. He thinks about the light streaming in through that bottle of whiskey. Dean grips the mattress tight. He prays.

  
  
  
  


He calls Sam. Sam picks up. He always picks up. They’re blood. 

“I could use you on this one,” Dean says.

“We going after Castiel?”

“Yeah,” says Dean. “Yeah. I’m getting the sorry son of a bitch back. But I could really use another Winchester.”

“Let me talk to Eileen,” Sam says, and then he exhales and then he says, “Yeah. You got me, Dean. You know you do.”

“If your kids…”

“I think they might like getting to know their uncle Castiel,” Sam says.

Dean’s throat tightens. He coughs some to get it loose. 

“Thanks, Sam.”

“Tell me where to meet you.”

He tells him.

  
  
  
  
  
  


They walk together into the desert, to the packed dirt with their tools. This is where they will begin the work. This is where they will bring Castiel home.

Dean walks by a wizened tree, a bark thing twisted low to the ground. In it, a sparrow darts. It turns its wings. It flutters away and in the shadow of the Impala, it finds cooler air, a place to hide. A place to rest its head as the men in their boots begin to break up the hard desert earth.

  
  
  


In the void Castiel stirs. He turns in his sleep. His chest is aching. The place where a heart should be throbs. It beats. In his dream he is a sparrow, flying, and when he tilts his head, with his eye he sees someone beloved. Someone dear. Someone who is coming to hold him.

**Author's Note:**

> Finished writing this as the finale was airing, so forgive ... everything.
> 
> eta, having achieved spoilers: LMAO NVM


End file.
